Category Archives: Home Improvement

Going Postal

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When it absolutely, positively has to get there… sooner or later. Maybe.
Buzz Machine: The Death of snail mail and Sunday papers
I was actually waiting for some mail to arrive, and finally received it today. My eye doctor had promised to mail my latest eye prescription card 2 weeks ago today, but the office manager forgot to put it in the mail until a few days ago. My husband David was waiting for stuff, too, and had checked the mailbox 3 times today. Third time’s the charm; the letter carrier must have just gone by.

I rarely get mail anymore (note to self: to get it, you have to send it). And with Chicago’s shabby record with mail delivery chances are you might not get it at all. However, when the system works, it works well, as most person-to-person mail gets delivered the second day here in the suburbs. My prescription card came in an envelope postmarked July 23rd.

I don’t think “snail mail” will go completely away, but it’s already becoming more of an event marker than a communication method, aside from holiday postcards. The only time I mail something now is for holiday and (when I remember in time) birthday cards.

Back when our street was torn up and repaved, all the mail boxes were pulled up and a set of community boxes were temporarily installed about a block away, near the park. Picking up mail became almost a social outing, as neighbors that normally never saw each other walked or drove by to pick up their mail, usually in the afternoon or evening after work. I actually missed it when it was over and we had our nice new street back, along with the brand new mailbox (the old one had a rotted post).

The Washington Post reports that “in the past year alone, the Postal Service has seen the single largest drop-off in mail volume in its 234-year history…. That downward trend is only accelerating. The Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.”

No, physical delivery won’t ever die. (Like a good newspaperman, I lie in headlines to get attention.) Indeed, we’ll get more ever deliveries of more stuff that used to be on store shelves but are now ordered online. That’s what UPS’ and FedEx’ businesses are built for. But, as the Post says, we’re sending fewer messages to each other; we have much better means to do that now. And companies are trying hard to reduce their cost of dealing with us – billing, bank statements – by taking that online.

Fan C

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We’re planning on using some upcoming vacation time to do some home improvement projects… yes, it’s The Floor Project From Hell: Next Generation, and theoretically The Floor Project From Hell: Back To Bed. Part of that project will be adding 2 ceiling fans in the two “guest” bedrooms (with the help of a real electrician) and so today we went around looking at fans. There’s a place in the neighborhood that actually specializes in fans, so we went there first.

Interesting experience: it’s a small stripmall store front, absolutely stuff full of stacks and stacks of boxed ceiling fans. There is the usual overhead festival of fans, too. Finally, there were a number of people in the shop looking around, and 2 or maybe 3 salespeople. We were assured that they offered just as good discount prices as “the big box” stores, with better selection of higher-end fans. Well, okay, but our needs are pretty basic; one biggish fan, probably white, for the bigger guest bedroom, which has a vaguely summer-cottage look. And one smaller fan, for the very small third bedroom that was the featured player in said Floor Project for lo these 4 or more years. In the end, once we had the right tools (nailer for baseboards, a decent “fold and lock” floor product) it ended fairly quickly. So we’re hoping the sequels won’t be quite as horrible, and today’s visit to the fan store was part of the prep for the big push.

The saleswoman at the store was very helpful, gave us gobs of catalogs and brochures, and talked about which models are the big sellers/most popular with do-it-yourselfers (or with people looking to have someone else install them like us). She also mentioned that many of the large DIY retailers were going more for “house brands” and away from the name brands such as those she carried. We nodded and smiled and tried to look knowledgeable, and then went over to one of the big box stores to compare prices.

Interestingly, she was right about the big box place not carrying all the high-end models, and the no-name house brands, and so on. But we also found a couple of lower-end models that might suit just fine, still made by the one maker we like, Hunter (one of our other existing fans is a Casablanca, and we like that too).

We left the big box place without purchasing, though, because the guy “helping” us flipped through a pricing catalog when we asked if a different color was available, and he said off-handedly that the catalog prices were 3 years out of date. Then he said that anything on the shop floor was whatever price was marked, but special orders would be whatever the current “catalog rate” was. Not too helpful, and he took umbrage when David opined that it seemed like “bait-and-switch” to him. So we eggzitted, leaving the guy to mutter something that rhymed with “switch” in our wake.

Oh, boy! We’re already starting off with a bang! This’ll be epic!

So far, what we hope to accomplish during our staycation:

  1. Empty larger guest bedroom, move items into smaller guest bedroom
  2. Rip up carpet, remove baseboards
  3. Possibly touch up ceiling paint, walls are still fine
  4. Prep subfloor, put down underlayment
  5. Lay fold-and-lock floor (same color as in small bedroom)
  6. Stain and replace baseboards and shoe molding
  7. Move furniture back into room
  8. If time remains, dismantle/move master bedroom furniture in small room
  9. Repeat items 1-7, possibly with professional painting before laying floor

We’ll see if we get to the second room. The furniture in the guest room is a LOT lighter than that in the master bedroom, so there’s a likelihood we’ll be borrowing a handtruck to move the heavier pieces temporarily into the other rooms. But if we get the guest bedroom totally done, I’ll be satisfied.

Thank God It’s Saturday

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I’m not sure how much I should say, or how much I can safely say, about yesterday. So I’ll ease into it by catching up on the entire week.

Last week this time, I was dropping David off at O’Hare, because he was getting ready to go to a technical conference, at which he was making a couple of presentations. He’d worked hard on his slides, and I’d helped him edit them and streamline them generally. At last year’s conference, he was nervous about being up for an award, and he called me in a panic demanding to know if I’d packed his dress pants, which devolved into a conversation we like to call “WHERE ARE MY PANTS???!!1!?”

He found the pants, he wore the suit, he was photographed wearing pants, all was well. So this year, he knew he’d be nervous before his first presentation, so we rehearsed his lines a little when he called after he arrived.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/V-WFgoS_7b0" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /]

So the first part of the week went along pretty smoothly – I watched the Chuck finale and got all Twittery about it and looked at a lot of “Save CHUCK”-themed websites, and then I ordered an official Jeffster T-shirt, apparently. As in, I didn’t know for sure if the NBC.com website had actually registered the sale, because it froze up, but I received an email shipping notice. I watched a lot of clips online, I went to Hulu and watched an episode I’d missed, I was pretty much “all Chuck, all the time” on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. There are a lot of people putting together clever campaigns to get the word out, and there have been some fun (even awesome) fan videos. Here’s a really good one from the www.nbcsavechuck.com website:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/bSMoRE1RqUs" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /]

I really hope it gets renewed – there’s some hope that it might, but do we really need yet another copdrama??

Here’s a better quality video that shows series star Zachary Levi making sandwiches at a Birmingham UK Subway shop, after leading the hungry nerd-horde over from an SF convention. Yes, he washed up and donned the funky plastic-bag gloves. You can see he’s actually working his ass off trying not to slow down the production line, while cracking jokes and keeping the mood going. Fun guy.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/uDtePZ1MFT0" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /]

So that got me to Wednesday, which was choir practice. We had a new person with us, and now we have 2 Cindys. We pulled out some music we played around with last year that never got used for a service, a very “la-la-la-la” arrangement of “How Can I Keep From Singing” that consists of very minimalist, monotone runs that shift around the same few notes, in harmony, at a very fast pace. It was maddening trying to learn it last year, and gratifying to pick it up and not have completely lost the memory of it. When done right, it sounds like closely tuned windchimes, especially at the end.

Thursday, I had a fun day at work, very productive. And also, I got poked on Facebook by an old friend, who had realized that we both knew each other slightly on Second Life. And in fact, we’ve attended at least a few of the same events as part of the General‘s Cafe Wellstone/Donkey Club group. I mean, this is someone who came to my wedding in Boulder, who I’ve known as long as I’ve known David, and who I used to hang out with in the ancient-of-days AOL chat rooms. So of course Thursday night we got together online to tour each other’s “homes” (mine’s a rented room, hers is an entire, frickin’ beautiful sim). As she noted, it’s a small virtual world.

baconflu

I’ll pass on commentary for the week’s news – there was so much going on that I pretty much covered piecemeal via Twitter already. I’ve been following the baconflu story, of course. As it develops, it seems odd that so many people died in Mexico from what seems to be a fairly mild late-season flu, but it may be that the authorities were over-reporting pneumonia cases. Which begs the question, why were the people in that area so vulnerable to respiratory disease?

So that brings us to yesterday, Friday. David was scheduled to return that afternoon, and the original plan was to try to get out early so I could pick him up. For a while there, I thought I was going to get out REAL early, as in, permanently.

About an hour after log-in time, the team leaders started sitting down in the midst of the teams to pass along most unpleasant news: there was to be a “force reduction” that day, and the way it was going to work was they would go to each person, take them to a conference room, and advise them what was happening.

!!!

So all day, everyone was watching everyone else, between calls. Of course, the call volume was massive, because many companies were curtailing travel due to the baconflu, and there were a lot of changes and cancellations. Every time a team leader left his or her desk, all eyes would watch to see if they went to tap someone on the shoulder. It was nerve-wracking in the extreme, as it wasn’t seniority-based. You weren’t necessarily “safe” if you were on any kind of counseling for phone stats or attendance or customer service issues. Now and then, someone would be walked back to the conference room, but I never actually witnessed anyone getting tapped, only the aftermath when people came out to say good-bye to friends.

Every now and then, our team leader would walk into the row to talk to people about stuff totally unrelated to the reduction. At one point, she came to my desk to drop off an amended call-stat form and about gave me a heart attack. “I’m not touching you! Not touching! Don’t worry!” There was a lot of nervous laughter.

In the end, my TL only had to give bad news to one person on the other half of my team, as our half is staffed at a level our client sets. We’d already had a kind of reduction earlier by not replacing a member who transferred to another team. But several people I know were tapped, and came over to say good-bye.

In one case, I was not all that shocked or surprised, although I did feel sad for a former teammate who was always cheerful and kind-hearted, if not all that detail-oriented. I was shocked that someone I didn’t know as well as I should was let go, who had almost 2 decades of service with the company. I mean, that second one really made my mouth dry up, because I realized that nobody was really all that “safe.” I started going over stuff, like a tardy that I got marked up on recently, and a debit memo I’d picked up on an exchange, and a rash of accuracy errors (really minor ones, that I’d reduced significantly). I was also worried that I’d been racking up too much overtime, owing to being a “closer,” and wondered if they’d wait until the end of the shift only to be handed “the packet.”

Everyone was feeling the stress – some of my current teammates mentioned repeatedly that they couldn’t focus on what they were doing, and had repeatedly made the same entries and re-checked the same things multiple times. My stomach hurt (muscle tension) all day, and still hurts a little today.

Finally, the phone lines became so busy that we could forget to worry – we were much too busy to stop and be told we didn’t have a job anymore. At some point, the tension lightened and a rumor went around that the last person in the reduction had been informed, and the nightmare was over for the rest of us (although in this economy, it was just beginning for “the reduced”).

At the end of the day, there were a series of conferences with our local VP for a wrap-up, so that people could ask questions, get answers that were a little more definitive than the rumors that had been sweeping through the cube-rows, and decompress a little. The sense of survivor’s guilt/relief was palpable; everyone laughed a little too loudly or smiled a little too brightly at the friendly small-talk made by our exec and another company person who was there for the day’s unhappy event. When I logged off for the day, I’d taken 25 calls… another teammate took 27… and an agent who used to be my TL on a previous team took a whopping 58 calls. She must have caught all the short, quick, “I have to cancel my trip” calls that we got, as a lot of meetings next week had been pushed back. I got stuck with a fair number of fix-it calls, changes, and unprofiled people making arrangements for training or interviews. All of which take more time on the phone, because they’re not cut-and-dried reservations along the lines of “I need to go from [city] to [city] on [date] at [time] via [airline], with specific car and hotel, then return on [date] at [time].”

I had several hairy things to change on Southwest, for example, that took half an hour start to finish because of the peculiarities of their interface with our reservation system. As in, a phone call is required, and it’s necessary to sit through their jokey and annoying “in-call hold entertainment.” It was a ten-minute hold: I wasn’t ready to dig my eyeballs out with a spork by the end, but I was eyeing the available cutlery. Once that was done, I had a number of “smooth” calls, with no “I’m a VIP stuck at the airline counter, what the hell are you going to do about it right now?” calls.

David had let me know he’d grabbed a cab with our favorite guy and would await me at home. It was such a relief to have him back, after all the baconflu crap earlier in the week and after Friday’s horror show.

After catching up with each other, we went out for sushi (yay! sushi!) and had a quiet evening “in” after that – I was online, celebrating May Day with great tunes, and David was discussing the conference and his presentations with his listie contacts.

Although today was gorgeous, we had to drop David’s car off for scheduled maintainance, so after lunch and book-buying we’re hanging out, just being “at home.” About when I might like to take a refreshing nap, it’ll be time to go back and ferry David to his car, and get groceries. At least I got all the crap and garbage and junk cleaned out of my own car – I even vacuumed it! And part of the garage! Woo-hoo! Saturday chores are neato!

I just thank God it’s Saturday, because it’s not Friday anymore.

Vlad The Appraiser

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What with one thing and another, its a good time to refinance, plus apparently were part of a trend according to the President. So some guy by the name of Vlad is coming over to appraise the house for the mortgage company.

Thats right, its an obvious joke, but still we laughed.

Time and Doing Things

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March 7
March is the homeowner’s month.
It is time to put away the snow shovel,
but not yet time to get out the lawnmower.

For the first time in… probably a year or more, the dining room table is cleared off as a friend is coming over so David can take a look at his laptop. The stuff that was on there was a mish-mosh of things that Timmy sent me from Mom’s house; I’ve successfully ignored them all this time because I’d unpacked them with the vague idea of organizing, sorting, and tossing junk and only got 3/4 through the task. It wasn’t especially painful looking at the things, but I tended to get lost in remembrance.

But the occasional visitor can do wonders for lack of motivation here at Chez Gique, and so not only is the table cleared off, but the console table in the living room has been tidied, dusted, and rearranged (though not the lower shelf) and the coffee table has also been cleared of clutter (framed pictures, junk) and dusted.

I moved some of Mom’s tchotchkes onto my desk with yet another vague idea: actually paying more attention to them now and then. Mom had a funny little calendar thing that she got as a table favor at a luncheon years ago that someone made that has a little quote or aphorism for every day of the year, and Mom had kind of used it as a rotating reminder of birthdays, anniversaries, her weight, and funny little notes. Just this morning, my husband David asked me if he should put the snowblower away for the season (fold the handle, shove it under the workbench) and I said I thought we’d get one more big storm. Even though yesterday was unseasonably warm – more than 60F – and we had a big booming rainstorm last night and today, my instinct was to assume that winter isn’t quite done screwing us over here in the Midwest.

And then when I was going through the Mom stuff and looked at her little date thing for today, there it was: her commentary on the changing season. It appears likely that it may be time after all to put away the snow shovel, at least according to this conveniently timed little message from Mom.

She may be trying to tell me to keep the house in its newly less-cluttered state, too, but let’s not get carried away here.

A cook’s favorite, sturdy tool | csmonitor.com

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A cook’s favorite, sturdy tool | csmonitor.com
Years later, my brother came to the rescue. He hollered at me for washing my skillet with soap, and sternly informed me that it should only be cleaned with water, coarse salt, and hot oil – never soap. He seized my trusty-but-iffy skillet, scrubbed it with handfuls of coarse salt, and snatched the canola oil, pouring in a very small amount onto the skillet. Next, he proceeded to quickly heat the skillet to a high temperature, spreading the oil with a paper towel. When he was finished, it was smooth and clean.

Fake Amish, Fake Craftsmanship, Fake Savings

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Don’t be fooled by the images of the portable heater with the “Amish-Made” mantle. You pay through the nose for something that puts out about as much heat as a $21 heater from Wal-mart. The photos showing Amish men wiping cabinets and driving away with them in the back of a horse-drawn buggy are likely Photoshopped. The heating element is made in China… need I say more?

And the same company has been linked to a scheme selling digital converter boxes that can be obtained for a fraction of the price with a government coupon.

Arlington, VA – June 20, 2008 – BBB is alerting consumers to beware of a misleading advertising campaign by an Ohio-based company called Universal TechTronics. Ads are running across the U.S. promising free television channels, services and digital TV converter boxes, but are really a bait and switch tactic that prey on consumers’ lack of knowledge about digital TV conversion requirements.

Via US National BBB.org: News Center

Big Red Snow Beast

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big-red-snow-beast

Last night’s snow (or as I originally typo-ed, slow), dumped only about 4 inches on suburban streets in the area, but the traffic was horrendous and there were enough minor accidents to put corks in all the bottlenecks. And due to the way the east-west arterials around here are blocked by large tracts of parkland or shopping malls, there’s only a few ways to get between work and home. If there’s bad weather, or traffic, everything gets choked off at one of two places.

I started out pissed, as I had a late “hit” call where someone needed an exchange ticket issued by the end of the day, and there were technical problems getting it done. I call down curses and imprecations on high-mileage status travelers who upgrade themselves before the new ticket issues! But I was able to get through to an airline res agent (miraculously; it’s an airline that outsources a lot of calls to India)
and downgrade the traveler. Heh, that’ll teach them not to mess with their records… I felt very unsympathetic.

As I headed west towards home, I puttered along at about 5 miles an hour. It took about 30 minutes just to get to where I could turn off my “bottleneck” route to an alternate street that avoided the worst of the traffic. Then I had to navigate around some other obstacles, cut through a high-school parking lot to an outlet to residential streets that I knew of, and finally got back to a more direct route home. It turned out that my zig-zagging didn’t really save me much time, but it did give me a sense of accomplishment since I was moving rather than sitting in a jam-up.

David texted his location a couple of times… he started an hour before I did because he’s farther away, and it took him all of 3 hours to get home. I beat him home by about half an hour and had started using the Big Red Snow Beast on the driveway. It was still snowing pretty heavily and I had all my snow
gear on; boots, gloves, long down coat, muffler around my ears and face, fleece jingle hat with ear flaps, and had the faux-fur trimmed hood up as well. I was seriously rocking the Arctic look.

Of course, David had to take a picture. Fear the Beast!

(It is left up to the discretion of the reader to decide which is meant, the machine or the operator.)

I’ve recently gotten sucked into the time warp that is Twitter and was monitoring a few locals who complained of 3 and 4-hour commutes. It was particularly bad in the north suburbs, where there was more snow, no plows, no salting, and nothing but side streets and minor arterials that were all completely backed up.

I’m currently writing this at work in Wordpad while waiting for a call with my “ears” on, with the plan of sending the text to myself and updating at home. This is my first full week sitting with my new team, and I’m comfortably settled in with my new work-mates. I kept much more to myself on my former team,
partly because I’d formerly held a position that was between line agents and the previous team leader, and I was not popular because I was responsible for quality control at one time and was gathering data about error rates for each agent. That was years ago, but I sensed there was still some lingering… not resentment, but reserve. I wasn’t entirely to be trusted, I guess, and I didn’t bother to try to overcompensate by bringing in a lot of treats or being very social with everyone else. I don’t have this
baggage with the new team, and as it happens I work with a former team leader who stepped back to agent level whose company I enjoy. And I work with people who make me laugh and enjoy being here. It’s a pleasant change from my previous “anti-social” stance to actually chat with my neighbors.
There are minor drawbacks to the move, of course – there always are. But the compensations are: great coffee (they bring in their own bags of it and keep it in a thermos at one of the desks) and great cameraderie. It’s nice. Also, I’m closer to a window now that I don’t have to be hopping up and down
printing and faxing forms to hotels, and I have a view that looks along a tollway towards Chicago.

Currently, traffic is flowing. But don’t ask me to do constant updates. I will say that there’s snow on all the rooftops and the sky is a solid grey. Visibility is probably only a mile or two, and I don’t think we’re
on the flight path today because I don’t hear planes overhead. This may or may not be a good thing.

It’s kind of slow today. I haven’t taken that many calls. One of my mates from my former team and I send IMs to each other with questions and comments now and then, as we back each other up and she’s not physically located in the office. Now and then she sends funny emoticons and animated
GIFs.

I call this one “ZOMG! I’m In Crazy Town!”

crazy-town

It’s animated in the original format so that the background wobbles up and down, but I didn’t save it that way. My office mate sends me a lot of wacky crap like this. Most of them involve animals or weird cartoons expressing extreme agitation. I think there’s an underlying theme…

It helps to pass the time chatting, of course, but sending IMs is also dead useful when you can’t reach someone by phone, but they’re logged in to the messaging network. To ask questions like “WTF can’t these people put in the right format???” Both of us are crabby, perfectionists when it comes to formats, and unsociable; this makes us ideal IM partners.

Later, after lunch….

I continue to see more and more small signs of the bad economy. There are empty “big-box” stores on my way home, there are empty offices in my building at work, and just now I got waylaid by my hairdresser lady who said that they’re closing the hair salon downstairs. They needed to increase their visibility, and had lost a lot of regular clients because so many companies here pulled out and went away. It’s not a ghost building, but the trend is not an upward one. Anyway, she stopped me to give me a business card with the new address and phone number. They merged with another salon in the area and there are a couple of locations, but the closer one is farther to the east of me.

It may be that once they’re moved, I’ll get my hair done on choir nights, as I have about 90 minutes
to kill between the end of the day and choir, and this new location is not far out of the way to Holy Moly. So it could work out that I could keep going to Evelyn, because I like her and she’s willing to give me a simple, unfussy cut. And she likes long hair, which is a plus: some hair stylists are always on about “this long hair drags your face down.”

Dudette, I come from a long line of horse-faced people; there’s only so much you can do with a chin-length pageboy or an unnecessary (and damaging) body wave perm. Evelyn is happy to keep my hair long.  Done.

Actually, with short hair, I look a lot like Mr Crazy Town, especially without makeup. Let’s not go there.

Today’s weather has gradually cleared – the clouds that were overhead this morning are gone, replaced by mostly blue sky and fairly bright sun. It makes for some pretty shadows and contrast where the light is coming across the trees from the forest preserve across the way. By the time I leave, though, it’ll be dark. And I’ll be on my way to choir practice, so I won’t be home tonight until after 8pm.

For music this year at Holy Moly, we’re doing a modified “Lessons and Carols” format for Christmas Eve – for the later service at 9pm, that is. I’m not part of the earlier Family Service, thank GOD. It conflicts with work, anyway, as I’m scheduled to work until 5pm on the 24th. Bleh.

Anyway, the music will be good and lovely and I hope it puts people in the right headspace. One is especially good, as it’s not one of those standards you always hear: it’s called “What Sweeter Music” by John Rutter. It’s gorgeous, with floating harmonies that shimmer. Even with our few, poor voices, it sounds good. We’ll have some “ringers” on the night, though, so it’ll be even better.

Some of the other pieces will be effective – some are kind of required favorites, but a few are nice arrangements that aren’t just the plain vanilla versions sung from the choir book. One of the traditions at St Nicholas is for people to bring little bells to ring, so there’s something for that as well. We’ll have something for every taste, high class singin,’ low-class ringin,’ everybody join in on the chor-e-us.

On my mind in the news: the sheer gobsmackery of Rod Blagojevich’s hair, and the special hairbrush called “the football” that was carried by an aide, ready for any photo or video opportunity. It’s going to be what used to be called a “mare’s nest” of countercharges, questions about members of the impeachment committee’s own “favors and perks” for friends and family, and will turn out to be a giant waste of everybody’s time. Blago reportedly is defiant and claims he’s done nothing wrong; impeachment proceedings were being floated around the General Assembly months ago because he was seen as incompetent and an obstacle to the legislative process, not because of any of Fitzgerald’s charges. Still, they add spice, all those recordings of Blago (and his wife) dropping the F-bomb. I keep an eye on the news via the iPhone while waiting for calls.

Nearing the end of the day here, finally; the number of calls picked up and the afternoon went faster than the morning. Time is weird that way.

I’ll get grumped at at choir, because I was sick last Wednesday and still not feeling great Sunday, so I’ve missed 2 practices AND a Sunday, le horreur! but it’s never a good idea to run around in sub-freezing weather with a cold. In my experience, it just leads to the cold going into a sinus infection or bronchitis, so I’ll take the dirty looks in my direction, because I got over the cold without further ado (or catarrh).

UPDATE: Made it home safely after choir practice. We sounded awful, not sure why. I think it was because Mary decided to rearrange us and we were “upside-down” musically (or more likely, sideways) and hearing a different blend. Also, it was time for Mary’s annual Christmas Hissy… the stress of the season gets to her, especially when we’re not sounding good after months of work (and after sounding much better in our previous configuration).

Also, my friend Kevin reminded me via Facebook of the very funny “conversation between Rahm and Blago” that was posted at dKos the other day. Heh. This is the best part of this CLEVERLY SATIRICAL PARODY.

BLAGO: What if I appoint Valerie, what if she takes it?

EMANUEL: What do you want me to say? We’d appreciate it, I’m not gonna fucking kiss your ring over it.

BLAGO: “Appreciate it”? Come on, this is a Senate seat we’re talking about. It’s worth a fuck of a lot more than appreciation.

EMANUEL: You asked us for a list, we gave you a fucking list, you want to make your own list then make your own fucking list. [Raising voice] But if you’re asking for anything else from me, or Barack, or Valerie, then you can fucking stop talking right now Rod.

BLAGO: Wait a sec there Rahm. Wait just a fucking minute. Who are you to talk to me like that? I fucking made you.

EMANUEL: You made me? You made me? Tell me you’re fucking joking.

BLAGO: No no no, you listen to me shit-face. You see this list I got, the names motherfucking Obama fucking wants for the Senate. I just ripped it in two. How you like that? Oops, Harris just dropped it in the shredder. Harris?

HARRIS (muffled): Yes sir?

BLAGO: Did you just drop that list in the shredder?

[Whirring, shredder noise]

HARRIS (muffled): I did.

EMANUEL: Do you have me on fucking speakerphone?

BLAGO: It’s in the shredder, Rahm. The list is bye bye.

EMANUEL: Hold on a sec — you got me on fucking speakerphone? Who the fuck do you think I am?

BLAGO: Who are you Rahm? Who are you? You’re shit, you hear me? Don’t come back to Chicago Rahm, it’s not your town any more.

EMANUEL: Pick up the phone Rod.

Also also, more holiday-themed “heh.”

funny pictures of cats with captions